We are planning to conduct BOF sessions (Birds Of a Feather) at Web 2.0 Expo. Each session will be specific to a particular Amazon Web Service. Times and locations will be announced in this blog as soon as they are final.

Over at TechCrunch, Mike Arrington recently shared some of his concerns about linking to up and coming new sites. Any site featured on TechCrunch will see a huge inflow of traffic when seemingly everyone the tech world visits it within the course of a couple of hours to check it out:

There’s a spike, and then most of the people never come back. Hopefully a few stick around, register and tell their friends, but building an
application to scale to handle a TechCrunch post is a long term solution to a short term problem.

Before I could even respond, the Crunchback blog proposed theTechcrunch Reference Architecture. In his words:

Build using Amazon EC2 and S3.Use a load-balanced architectureAdd EC2 nodes when you go live - as many as you can…Alert TechCrunchWait for mention (pray for mention)2 days later start reducing nodes…

It almost goes without saying that this is in alignment with our own thinking in this area. Instead of scaling in advance for traffic that may or may not materialize, we believe that developers should create a scalable architecture, host it on Amazon EC2, and then simply "turn the knob" (so to speak) when traffic surges. They pay for actual usage while those servers are active, and then simply turn that knob back down when the surge subsides. No fuss, no muss, and no rack full of servers that are sometimes running at capacity and at other times sitting idle.

-- Jeff;

Updates:

TechCrunch reference architecture came from CrunchBack, not from Phil Wolff.

I am heading down to Provo, Utah next week to speak to the Utah Valley Ruby Brigade on the night of the 13th.

I had a couple of leads for interesting meetings during the day, but they didnt' pan out. If you would like to chat about the Amazon Web Services and are in the area, drop me a note (awseditor@amazon.com) and we'll figure something out.

There's a new release of EC2-powered Mux out and you can read all about it on their blog. New features include support for the OGG format, thumbnail generation, BitTorrent support, a Second Life mode, and an RSS feed of Mux'd files.

The CouchVille TV program guide uses the E-Commerce Service to provide product links on movie pages. For an example, check out the page for Big.

The Community Edition of the OpenFount InfoMirror is now free. InfoMirror is a backup, synchronization, and file mirroring web application built around Amazon S3.

PicSquare is yet another S3 user. They happen to be India's leading online photo portal for sharing, photo printing and gifting. The service is using S3 to store all the user photos and serving photos directly from S3.

Their official description is that "Social Media Club (SMC), is a global knowledge market for users and creators of emerging media. Professionals in industries such as public relations, marketing and communications join together in person and online with technology providers, advertising executives, bloggers, podcasters and entrepreneurs to discuss how their industries intersect. SMC has 15 chapters in the US, Canada and the UK, with over 1500 participants."

Official description aside, what is important--at least, to me--is that I keep running across local chapter members, and these members are really active in the same communities that use Amazon Web Services. For example, at last week's Ruby on Rails and Houston Refresh joint meeting, Erica O'Grady was there, fresh from the Austin Social Media Club meeting.

Howard says that part of the key to him is to be able to get the business users of Social Media in the same room, having the same discussion as the technical creators of these media. "If we get the entrepreneurs, the developers and the business folks working together, we can help move the industry forward at a faster rate."

There's a really active discussion about what works (and what doesn't) going on in several places, with Social Media Release being one example. Worth a visit to discover what social media means to you--I believe that you'll be hearing a lot more about this...

This podcast closed a pretty interesting loop for me. Way back in 2003, I was one of Doug's first interview subjects. At that time the word I believe that podcast had yet to be invented, and people raised a skeptical eyebrow when he talked about recording and distributing interviews as MP3 files. Today, this is a very common use case and it is clear that Doug was way ahead of his time.

Researcher Simson Garfinkel has written a detailed review of Amazon's S3 and EC2 services.

His new article, Commodity Computing with Amazon's S3 and EC2, starts out by reviewing the basics of S3 and then digs deeper into performance and security. After a brief review of EC2, he describes his own s3_glue, a C++ client library for S3. You can find s3_glue attached to this discussion board thread.

While the overall review is positive, Simson identifies some areas where there is clearly room for improvement. We find this kind of information to be extremely helpful. The feedback that we get from reviews, discussion board messages, audience Q&A, and private emails is taken very seriously and feeds directly into our product plans.